Sustaining What? : Scarcity, growth, and the natural order in the discourse on sustainability, 1650–1900

Abstract

Concerns over deforestation and soil erosion are documented in literatures from ancient Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome, and Mauryan India, to name a few. With new regimes of economic order and abstract social nature came new ideas concerning the purposes and dynamics of economic activity and the management of nature. The capitalist heartlands of Europe and their ex-colonial appendages deployed economic and military advantage to seize control of the world's land surface—from 10 percent in 1700 to 30 percent in 1800 and 85 percent in 1900. Would it be hyperbolic to suggest that the concepts of sustained economic growth, scarcity and sustainability were triplets—the more or less simultaneous progeny of the transformations? Consider sustainability. In the temperate and forested lands of England and New England, Mike Davis points out, "energy flows through the environment in a seasoned pattern that varies little from year to year.